It's like paradise, spread out with a butter knife :: [OPEN]

[bonhomme7h.livejournal.com]

Who: EVERYONE
What: Réjean has decided that more people ought to celebrate and help raise a bit of dosh for one of his favourite bars. See: flyer.
Where: The Apache.
When: Misdi night and into the wee hours of the morning.
Warnings: Discussion of Pickman's manky feet.

The Apache is much the same as it always is: dimly lit, with the jukebox playing in the background, and the bartender serving whatever's on tap. Tonight, the bar is packed with people from all across the city, different cantons and cohorts, all out to celebrate surviving the fungal plague. Patrons are encouraged to buy tickets for a door prize with the proceeds going to repair the damage tunnelling ants made to the cellar.

Comments

[rhinemaid]

"Who says I'm wearing any?" is the immediate response to that - she is, by the way, a cute little black lace thong that half the bar is probably going to get a look at when she ends up climbing the bar later on. Her received pronunciation and prim delivery makes the whole affair a bit incongruous, but rather than viewing that as a problem, Ilde tends to enjoy it for its own sake. It's great when she cusses, admit it.

"-oooh, thank you."

[fuckyouboots.livejournal.com]

"I see I've rubbed off on you good and well."

Cindy's not wearing any, for the record. Not under that slim and tight catsuit she's rocking. There's nothing more she hates than panty lines.

"So," she begins as the song dies down in between track changes, "is that other leg an illusion too or did an ant get yoou?"

[rhinemaid]

"Oh- that." That, her tone suggests, was not an ant. "I may have failed to mention a small detail about Ivan."

Really.

[fuckyouboots.livejournal.com]

Failed to mention or purposely left out? Whichever one it is, Cindy raises one eyebrow, waiting for Ilde to explain how Ivan and her injury are connected.

[rhinemaid]

"It turns out that fairy blood does interesting things to vampires," she says, quieter, just for Cindy's ears; this is not a change of subject.

[fuckyouboots.livejournal.com]

"And vampire dick does interesting things to fairies?" Cindy doesn't agree with Ilde's choice in men--effectively dropping Ivan's score to a C--but Ilde's a big girl. If she wants to let her man snack on her, so be it.

[rhinemaid]

After thinking about it for a moment, Ilde shrugs, sliding one foot up the back of the other leg. "Well, essentially. And if he breaks any of my rules, Sonja will kill him." And there's your reason why she doesn't look at vampires quite the way they're prone to expecting people to look at them.

[fuckyouboots.livejournal.com]

It wasn't a question Cindy actually wanted answer. Fucking with vampires, literally, is opening yourself to danger, but who is she to talk? She hasn't slept with one yet, but she has slept with questionable men herself.

"Your rules?" Cindy asks as she waves out a complete stranger for one on his cigarettes. She'll need to talk to Sonja later about her little sidekick here just to make sure they're all on the same page.

[rhinemaid]

"'Don't kill me' is rule one." It would be fair to say that Ilde doesn't have the healthiest survival instinct of all Baedal's citizens.

[fuckyouboots.livejournal.com]

"That's everybody's rule. Doesn't make you special, Il." No, Ilde certainly doesn't and that's something Cindy can agree with.

[rhinemaid]

"It is the important one." Generally. Other rules include 'don't touch anything I've recently injured' and 'don't lift me, I'm not kidding', but she's slightly more relaxed on that last one than the first. Presumably. "It's fine. See?" See how fine she is? ...stop drinking, Ilde.

[fuckyouboots.livejournal.com]

Oh, Cindy sees all right. She sees Ilde can't hold her liquor for shit and nothing Cindy says will have her be a little more careful about who she accepts dick from. So be it. Ivan will just have to answer to Sonja or Cindy if he fucks up. Does he knows this is the big question, though.

Cigarette in hand, she lights it and holds it out to Ilde. "At least he can't knock you up."

[rhinemaid]

Accepting the cigarette - she thinks vaguely of taking it easy on her throat, but she's done that a bit and it's boring - the words that come with it strike jaggedly against some internal wound and she thinks sooner or later that has to stop happening. If she can't make it right, at least some day it has to stop doing this to her, clenching a fist inside her and twisting every time someone makes some perfectly innocent remark that she should be prepared for, because it's perfectly fucking normal to say those things and she shouldn't feel like this.

By the time she realizes she hasn't said anything for too long, it seems a bit too late for a smooth save. She leaves it there, smoke hanging in the air.

[fuckyouboots.livejournal.com]

"I fucked up there, didn't I?"

She's not quite sure what she said wrong, in that Cindy meant that vampires can't reproduce the last time she checked, but Ilde's silence is long enough for her to recognize something ain't right. That fist has clenched itself many a time in Cindy's belly and it's enough for her to recognize it when it appears.

"My bad. I'm an asshole sometimes." Somewhat of an understatement.

[rhinemaid]

"It's fine," Ilde says, reflexively, waving it away with the smoke. Then, a moment later, "They, um, they said I was spayed." Sterilized, forcibly. This is one of those things that conversations with Cindy have veered away from, before, the history that Ilde's manner often hints at but that she hasn't had the occasion to mention in so many words before. It's always been the wrong moment. It's probably still the wrong moment; she's just less quiet, after a few drinks, and it is something of an open wound.

[fuckyouboots.livejournal.com]

Cindy wants to ask a million questions and get a million answers in return, but not here. Too many prying eyes and perked up ears. Not only is she concerned for Ilde, but for anything she might decide to slip. Sometimes acting is harder than it has to be.

She stubs her cigarette out on the edge of the bartop and lets the unsmoked part fall to the ground. "Let's go outside."

[rhinemaid]

"All right." The cooler air outside - almost anything is cooler than the heat of an over-crowded room full of alcohol and cigarette smoke - might serve to clear her head just a little bit, just enough, so that's something, too. She rests her hand on the bar as she steps away from it, making sure she's steady before she follows Cindy properly, shimmying the hemline of her skirt back to a slightly more acceptable length as she goes.

It doesn't really occur to her to disagree or, really, to ask why; they're going to talk, sure, and she's comfortable enough with Cindy that she doesn't really mind being steered now and again. Her nature is more deferential than she plays at.

[fuckyouboots.livejournal.com]

One of Cindy's hands lands itself on Ilde's shoulder, an outside force to steady the fae just a little more. And maybe it's to steer her through the throngs of people celebrating survival also. Funny how this world that's so different from Fabletown reminds Cindy of how they party for the Ides of March. It's not actually a party to have fun and let loose, but a party to honor those who didn't make it out of the Homelands on the last boat and those they've lost along the way, and most of all, to honor the fact that the ones celebrating today made it through by the skin of their teeth.

Two different worlds, same need to glorify the luck of survival.

Now that they're outside, the night air breezes across Cindy's face and she gently turns Ilde away from the bar's entrance and down the block into a less populated area.

[rhinemaid]

Ilde still has her cigarette in hand, but by the time they get outside it's not lit any more and she lets herself be led as she fumbles for a match to relight it as they walk. This is oddly familiar - half-stumbling out a party with a girlfriend, the 2AM drunken heart to heart, but normally it would've been a house and not a bar and she'd have been planning how to best disguise her antics the following day.

There's nobody to hide it from, now; she supposes she grew up, somewhere in there, out of sight. Then again- maybe not.

"It's quiet out here," she says, apropos of nothing. She may not be able to hear very well - the sound level was meaningless to her in there, watching people's mouths to understand what they were saying to her - but the music had thudded through her like a heartbeat and the amassed populace had been a dull roar rattling against her ribcage and her jaw. It feels different, without it.

[fuckyouboots.livejournal.com]

"That's the point," Cindy replies with a distinct lack of her usual snark in her tone. She stays on a lit path, but chooses one with nobody else walking down it at this time of the night. One thing Baedal has going for it is empty places to talk.

She turns them around the corner and onto a street bench, pushing lightly on Ilde's shoulder to sit her down.

"Who's they?"

[rhinemaid]

Swinging one foot behind the other and tucking both under the bench by reflex, Ilde looks up as Cindy asks - her expression flattens out in a way that by now she can probably recognize as 'self-protective'. When it's too raw, a part of Ilde just disconnects, and it's that that causes the false serenity she plays at so often. She learned how to be nothing.

"Prometheus," she says, looking up at the streetlamp above them. "They're a government organization in the United States. The study and suppression of supernaturals, I guess. That'll teach me to want a break from my father." It's a little wry, a little bitter, but her expression doesn't change again. "I wasn't a person."

[fuckyouboots.livejournal.com]

The simple description of the group sets Cindy's teeth on edge. Her world has their own bullshit organizations that have the idea that they're doing something good for people when it's really not. She's fought against a few of them and probably will fight against more if she ever goes back.

She would gladly kick this Prometheus' collective asses if she could. What that says about her friendship with Ilde is something strange even to Cindy.

"But you are now," Cindy adds as she sits down next to Ilde, leaning an arm against the back of the bench. "You were then too because you wanted your own life to live. Whatever they told you is absolute shit."

[rhinemaid]

"Sonja came with a group and destroyed the facility," she says, after a slight pause, "earlier this year. I was there for five years." The timeline of sixteen to twenty-one, perhaps, is beginning to make more sense in its own quietly hideous way; her sparse account is a creeping kind of horror, letting the mind of her audience fill in the blanks where she pauses, where her eyes are distant, where something tightens inside her and twists.

Her head tilts, remembering. "She gave me a knife and told me to kill the one I hated most. And then we were friends." ...yes. Sonja had been the first person in a long time to talk to her and not around her, the first person to treat her like something other than a problem to be solved, and Ilde's attachment to her is unmistakable and unabashed.

[fuckyouboots.livejournal.com]

Well that explains the attachment between the two women. Cindy's not going to ask whether or not Ilde did as Sonja told her to; that part's not her business and for what it's worth, she assumes Ilde did it anyway. Five years of horror is enough for one person to live through. She's not about to make Ilde live through it more just to satisfy her curiosity.

As for leveling the playing field, Cindy glances away from Ilde and begins rubbing her right ear idly. "Cindy."

[rhinemaid]

When her body first changed, she'd lain in wait for one of the guards and tested her new teeth on his shoulder in a fairly savage attack born out of desperation; it had failed, then, but she'd known the smell and taste of him and she remembers how it felt to drive the borrowed knife into him, in the rain. She doesn't bring it up, but the vicious satisfaction of it curls her fingers under her palms in memory before she slides into the next thought, away from that.

That Cindy has been lying doesn't really surprise her; what surprises (and pleases) her is being trusted with the truth, now, as she realizes is happening. Her willingness to talk about Prometheus is as much about delivering a quiet fuck you to their campaign of erasure and she doesn't expect reciprocity but treasures the implication of trust when it comes. It matters to her to matter to people - specific people. Like Cindy.

After a moment, she says, "I'll still call you Cynthia in public, right?" Because sharing with her doesn't mean sharing with the rest of the goddamn city, and she's pretty good at secrets and the keeping of.